May 26, 2021 For all her earlier accolades, "Small Things Like These," Keegan's first novel, enters the world this month with the shocking force of a debut. With its main text running to just 70 pages, it might have been deemed a novella, but it earns the greater designation. Keegan, whose short stories contain unusual depth and grandeur (see, for example, "Foster"), is the only contemporary writer who could manage the feat of a completely imagined, structured and sustained world with such brevity. The Ireland of the novel, set in 1985, has not entered the modern world of its neighbor, the U.K., never mind the far-off United States. Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, lives with his wife, Eileen, and their five daughters in a small town filled with "shop-keepers and tradesmen, men and women in the post office and the dole queue, the mart, the coffee shop and supermarket, the bingo hall, the pubs and the chipper." These clauses form only a part of a longer sentence about the raw weather of a late Irish autumn. Has anyone ever summed up a small town so succinctly? Despite their environs, those men and women have grand plans. As the Christmas holidays approach, Keegan sketches out the mundanities of their lives with delicate strokes: Bill's workers lunch at Kehoe's, receiving "fish & chips on Fridays" — a subtle reminder of the enduring cultural hold of the Roman Catholic Church. The Furlong family's holiday preparations are so blissfully simple, they make a 21st century reader want to donate her possessions to a recycling collective and join the #vanlife. One evening, Eileen decides it's past time to make the Christmas cake, which becomes a family affair. Bill creams the butter and sugar, Eileen prepares a lined baking tin, and the daughters chop up dried fruits. After such a festive task, they allow the girls to stay up late: "Sheila made up a jug of Ribena while Furlong stationed himself at the door of the Rayburn, toasting slabs of soda bread, comically, on the long fork, which the girls buttered and spread with Marmite or lemon curd." As for Bill, "something caught in his throat — as though there might never again be another night like this." Books Review: Class struggle is murder in a lean, unsparing British debut mystery Karen Powell's "The River Within" is far more than a "Downton Abbey"-derived Yorkshire mystery; it's the anatomy of a caste system that's never gone away.